About this book

Introduction

Rereading Marx, Weber, Gramsci and, more recently, Bourdieu and Foucault, Béatrice Hibou tackles one of the core questions of political and social theory: state domination. Combining comparative analyses of everyday life and economics, she highlights the arrangements, understandings and practices that make domination conceivable, bearable, and even acceptable or reassuring. Domination is all the more insidious and painless it often refers to the question of a desire of state. To carry out this demonstration, Hibou examines authoritarian or totalitarian situations —especially comparing the paradigmatic European cases of fascism, Nazism and Soviet socialism and those of contemporary China or North and Sub-Saharan Africa—which also allows us to grasp what domination is in the contemporary democratic framework. Hibou provides the reader with the necessary tools to develop a renewed critique of the downward political slide in the contemporary city.